Longtime Hollywood sound designer and wrangler Steve Lee remembers many filmmakers implementing the Fay Wray scream from 1933’s King Kong some three decades after it was released.

Ever since the Wilhelm Scream became a go-to sound effect in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, it has popped up in hundreds of movies, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment.

The key turn in the Wilhelm scream becoming more than just an expedient sound effect is that sound designers like Burtt talked about it to Lee’s generation, and then Lee wrote about it (and ...